3. Frankenstein in Frankenhausen (2001-09)
‘How long have you been on the run?’
[...] ‘I told you, ever since priests and prophets claimed a hold of my life. I fought with Müntzer and the peasants against the princes. Anabaptist in the madness that was Münster. Purveyor of divine justice with Jan Batenburg. Companion of Eloi Pruystinck among the free spirits of Antwerp. A different faith each time, always the same enemies, one defeat.’
- Luther Blissett, Q
Thomas Müntzer spoke to us, but we couldn’t understand his words. It wasn’t a blessing, but a warning.
It is impossible to disclaim the responsibility the Wu Ming collective had, at least in Italy. We were among the most zealous in urging people to go to Genoa, and helped to pull the movement into the ambush. After the bloodbath, it took quite a while – and a lot of reflection on our part – to understand our own (specific) errors in the context of the (general) errors made by the movement.
We had underestimated the enemy, and overestimated ourselves. Clearly, something had gone wrong with the practice of “mythopoesis” or “myth-making from the bottom up”, which was – and still is – at the core of our philosophy.
By “myth” we never meant a false story, i.e. the most banal and superficial use of the term. We always used the word for a narrative with a great symbolic value, a narrative whose meaning is understood and shared in the community (e.g. a social movement) whose members tell it one another. We’ve always been interested in stories that create bonds between human beings. Communities keep sharing such stories and, as they share them, they (hopefully) keep them alive and inspiring, ongoing narration makes them evolve, because what happens in the present changes the way we recollect the past. As a result, those tales are modified according to the context and acquire new symbolic/metaphorical meanings. Myths provide us with examples to follow or reject, give us a sense of continuity or discontinuity with the past, and allow us to imagine a future. We couldn’t live without them, it’s the way our mind works, our brain is “wired” to think through narratives, metaphors and allegories.
At a certain point, a metaphor may suffer sclerosis and become less and less useful, until it gets void of all meaning, a disgusting cliché, an obstacle to the growth of inspiring stories. When this happens, people have to veer off, looking for other words and images.
Revolutionary and progressive movements have always found their own metaphors and narrated their myths. Most of the times these myths survived their being useful and became alienating. Rigor mortis set in, language became wooden, metaphors ended up enslaving the people instead of setting them free. The following generation often reacted by negating the past and developing iconoclastic attitudes. The vanguard of each generation of radicals described the myths they inherited as nothing more than false stories. Some demanded that the radical discourse be “de-mythologised”, be it in the name of Reason, “political correctness”, nihilism or even plain stupidity (as in the ‘myths-are-intrinsically-fascist’ argument).
No-one can erase mythological thought from human communication, because it’s embedded in the circuitry of our brains. Cognitive scientists and linguists such as George Lakoff are proving that beyond doubt. We think through metaphors and narratives.
Every iconoclasm eventually generates a new iconophilia, against which new iconoclasts will rage. The cycle will be endless if we don’t understand the way these narratives work. The trouble with myths is not their intrinsic falsehood, truth… or truthiness. The trouble with myths is that they sclerotise easily if we take them for granted. The flow of tales must be kept fresh and lively, we have to tell stories by ever changing means, angles and points of view, give our tales constant exercise so they don’t harden and darken and clog our brains.
This, of course, is an extremely hard task, for several reasons.
First of all, it’s too easy to underestimate the dangers of working with myths. One always runs the risk of playing Dr. Frankenstein or, even worse, Henry Ford. We can’t create a myth at will, as though on an assembly line, or evoke it artificially in some closed laboratory. To be more exact: we could, but it would have unpleasant consequences.
Expanding some observations by Karoly Kerenyi, the Italian mythologist Furio Jesi drew a sharp distinction between a “genuine” approach to myths and a forced evocation of myths for a specific (usually political) purpose. Think of Mussolini describing the 1937 invasion of Abyssinia as “the reappearance of the Empire on the fateful hills of Rome”. Kerenyi and Jesi called the latter strategy “technification of myths”.
Technified myth is always addressed to those Kerenyi called “the sleeping ones”, i.e. people whose critical attitude is dormant, because the powerful images conveyed by the technifiers have overwhelmed their consciousness and invaded their subconscious. For example, we may “fall asleep” during the incredibly beautiful first half-hour of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938).
On the contrary, a “genuine” approach to myths requires staying awake and willing to listen. We have to ask questions and listen to what myths have to say, we have to study myths, go looking for them in their territories, with humbleness and respect, without trying to capture them and forcibly bring them to our world and our present. It is a pilgrimage, not a safari.
Technified myth is always “false consciousness”, even when we think we’re using it to a good purpose. In an essay entitled Literature and Myth, Jesi asked himself: ‘Is it possible to induce the people to behave in a certain way – thanks to the power exerted by suitable evocations of myths – and then induce them to criticize the mythical motives of their behaviour?’. He answered himself: ‘It seems practically impossible’.
In the heyday of the global movement (from Autumn 1999 to Summer 2001), we tried to operate in the space between the adverb (“practically”) and the adjective (“impossible”). We tried to use the adverb to break open the adjective. We deemed Jesi’s answer too pessimistic. We thought that “opening the laboratory” and showing the people how we processed “mythologemes” – i.e. the basic conceptual units, the metaphoric “kernels” of mythological narratives – was enough to provide the people with the tools of criticism. “Correct distance” from a myth was our chimera: not too close lest we might fall into a stupor, not so far that we no longer feel its power. It was a difficult balance to keep, and in fact we didn’t keep it.
Because the problem is also: who is the artificer of mythopoesis, the evocator, the obstetrician? It should be up to a whole movement or community or social class to handle myths and keep them on the move. No particular group can appoint itself to that office. At the end of the day, we ended up being “officials” assigned to manipulate metaphors and evoke myths. Our role became a quasi-specialised one. An agit-prop cell. A combo of spin doctors. Sure, From the Multitudes of Europe… could make your nerves sing, it made you feel like going to Genoa right away, but that was not enough. We never looked for ways to “criticize the mythical motives of our behaviour”. “Practically” never cracked “impossible”.
At present, there is no alternative but continuing the work: we have to continue the exploration, prick up our ears and approach myths in a way that’s not instrumental. We have to understand the nature of myths without wishing to reduce their complexity and test their aerodynamic properties in the wind tunnel of politics.
What happened in Genoa was not a “military” defeat: it was a cultural catastrophe. The tragedy was not being defeated in the street. The tragedy was being defeated in the street and as a cultural wave. After Genoa, the movement stopped being able to communicate in effective ways, and the media sucked all our blood.
20 July 2001. That friday afternoon, in that long street called Via Tolemaide, nobody wore white overalls. A few days before, we all decided to extend the practice of “padded civil disobedience” as widely as possible. Even such an open symbol as the overalls would stand in the way of that purpose. Ever more often, Tute bianche were being described as an organisation, a separate – albeit large – group, and the “Bibendum” tactic ran the risk of being associated exclusively with those activists. That’s why we all decided not to wear the overall in Genoa. Thus, it was only as a reference to a shared practice that the marchers pouring out of the Carlini Stadium described themselves as “the desobedients”.
Then the carabinieri murdered Carlo Giuliani, and all demonstrations disbanded because of overwhelming police brutality. Thousands of people had to fight their way back to the stadium, like the Warriors gang returning to Coney Island.
That night, we felt as pigeon-shooting targets. Everyone was scared, and yet we had to respond and take the streets again. At that point, our only hope was that as many people as possible come to Genoa to show their solidarity. The day after, 300,000 people turned up to save our sorry arses. They were not hardcore militants: hardcore militants were already in town. Those were ordinary people of progressive feelings, outraged by the carnage they’d seen on TV. We will always be grateful to that multitude, always, as long as we live. That saturday afternoon, we committed to never betray those people. Salvation laid in being open-minded, honest and comprehensible. Salvation laid in keeping away from sectarianism.
It was then that we instinctively started to work on a new mythologeme, one that would imply the criticism of the previous ones: Genoa as Frankenhausen.
A guy eavesdropping our conversation asked: – Who the fuck is this Frank Enhausen you keep talking about?
Less than two months after Genoa came 9/11. The situation in the country and the world got much tougher, and the metaphor of the “siege” turned upside down. In 2003 the Italian movement was already in a deep crisis. Not even mass mobilisation against the war on Irak could infuse new energy into its body. At last, it regressed to a marginal presence, a presence occupying the semantic space of traditional far-leftist discourse. The usual boring role played by boring rules. A bunch of “professional revolutionaries” took over what was left, made all kinds of mistakes and proved to be immensely inadequate. Fossilized sub-Leninist tactics and strategies re-surfaced. A lot of time and energy was dissipated in intra-group identity wars. Meetings became pathetic cock fights. The majority of sensitive, “unregimented” activists (especially women) got bored and quit. We were among those who quit.
In the meanwhile, a self-professed vanguard of the ex-tute bianche had embarked on new projects that we regarded as grotesque, projects whose description is clearly beyond the scope of this text. The collaboration between us and that network had lasted little more than a year. So passes a glory of this world.
Since then, we have devoted our time and effort to tightening the bolts of our literary project, writing new novels and essay and expanding our presence in culture and the cultural industry.
We didn’t give up the struggle, far from it, but never again will we play Frankenstein with technified myths.
And we keep going, and Don Durito’s army of animals keep going, and no defeat is definitive, and hearts are still beating.
4/4 – End.
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Here a short and somewhat unfinished reply from the NL..
First let me say that reading your text was a sobering experience. I think I never really understood nor thought much about the collapse of the Italian movement after Genoa. I was in Genoa myself during the G8 summit. Coming from a country where there is no social movement to speak of, (only a historical residue), Genoa was too much of a tantalizing experience to feel like a defeat.
Though I was there when they raided the Diaz school, shouting assassini when the bodybags were carried out. I was there in the Disobbedienti march, not long before the police broke through and the entire march started running, fleeing like a herd of panic-stricken animals all the way back to the stadium. I saw people being run over by the police charge rushing on behind us. Looking back, yes, it sure must have been a defeat, and probably a big one, but at the time it was simply too big a thing to take in.
Was Genoa a trap? Most likely. It probably was a strategic mistake to mobilize with the analogy of peasants storming the castle, as you explain in this article. It became another Frankenhausen, a centralized battle, whereas we should have opted for guerilla warfare. That’s a pretty fair assessment. But I believe you take your responsibility as storytellers too far, and as a consequence risk throwing out the mythical baby with the bathwater.
The principle reason I say this, is because in my opinion, it was not due to any ‘technified myth’, that the strategic mistake was made of centralizing conflict in one location. It was part of the very nature of the repertoire of the global movement as it developed after Seattle, and the June 18 Carnival Against Capitalism in London. Already then, far before Genoa, the main form of struggle had been instituted as “storming the castle”. The symbolic power of these events was due to their capacity to make visible what before remained an abstraction: the globalization process and the elite that fostered it. Remember how J18 targeted and shut down the City in London, the world’s foremost financial centre. At the Prague summit in 2000, I remember the symbolic power of seeing scared Worldbank employees in their tailor made suits: we had identified the enemy, and moreover, we were physically confronting them with our very own bodies (non-violently in my case, violently in the case of much others, though often the police were a preferred simulacrum of power). Since the very beginning, the global movement has been all about the creation of a centralized stage, on which to enact a conflict that remained largely symbolical. It was political theatre, and we knew it.
I like Paolo Virno’s comparison where he compares the nature of the antiglobalisation movement to that of a half-functioning voltaic battery: accumulating energy without rest but not knowing how and where to discharge it. I think I agree with him when he states that the symbolic-media dimension of the protests has been at once the reason for it’s power and for the limitation of that power. For we never knew what to do when we got home. We didn’t know how to move beyond the symbolic and actually politically intervene in our daily lives. But that was not the fault of the strength of the storming the castle allegory, it was the fault of a lack in our ability to translate the spectacle of protest back to our everyday lives and the everyday people that populate it.
As a reflection on the use of myth, I do believe what we have developed is a new form of the Sorelian myth. As the French syndicalist George Sorel believed in the necessity of evoking the myth of the general strike, as a “body of images” that symbolized all that was good about the socialist movement. Myth, according to Sorel, served to bind together a heterogeneous and divided people. Concurrently, the global movement has developed it’s own mythical repertoire: that of storming the castle. It has allowed us to bring together a colorful heterogeneity of actors, to create a movement of movements, that would otherwise have been deeply divided and demobilized. In this sense, the myth of “storming the castle” has always been a genuine myth as you describe it, actively discussed and reworked by thousands of people around the globe. Yet genuine myths can still be strategic mistakes: the summiteering has worked at times and has failed us at other times. Myth cannot be a replacement for strategy that’s for sure.
Although I do not agree with the classification of “peasants storming the castle” as a technified myth, I think the distinction this text proposes between technified myths that put people to sleep and genuine myths, that make people critically aware, seems useful. It is almost completely similar to the concept of ethical spectacle that Stephen Duncombe recently proposed in his book Dream. To him the progressive ethical spectacle is one of participation, where large amounts of people get to co-construct and carry out political spectacles, such as Reclaim the Streets parties and Critical Mass bike rides. We have seen it again in the Mayday parades. Also here, myth is never far, with San Precario in a leading role and precarious superheroes as figurants. Also here, the problem is not the myth, but being strategically able to develop beyond the symbolic repertoire.
Concluding, what troubles me is the disenchantment that resonates in the text. I think the problem is not the mythmaking (of course, professionalisation and specialisation, in a wider sense, can be). Only that mythmaking is not enough. A renunciation of myth or mythopoeisis seems to me untimely, since presently the mythical tables have turned and it is the right that has taken over the mythical initiative. One look at the Lega Nord, and their reworking of a mythical past, one look at the Tea Party and their mythical re-appropriation of the Boston Tea Party is enough to know that mere rationality is not the key to political strategy. We need a radical imagination, and we need storytellers. But what myths to tell?
Anyway I leave it here…
Merijn: You leave out Gothenburg from the equation. Some few of those who came from there warned: “There will be shots fired. Prepare for that.” Not blaming Wu Ming at all, but some italian comrades should have listened.
Thank you so much for the interesting and inspiring feedback, Merijn. There are invisible bonds between those who were in Genoa in those days, we developed a kind of transnational Frontkämpfergeist which goes beyond different views or memories. When we decided to write down our assumptions on Genoa’s defeat, almost two years ago, we knew such a text would strike very sensitive chords, and maybe be of some help to those who still reflect upon “what has to be done”.
Please, don’t worry about us throwing babies away. We may not use the term “mythopoesis” anymore, but of course we’re engaged in a daily, incessant work on narration, its importance, its capacity of casting light on the struggle. To make an example, while we were writing “Spectres of Muntzer”, we were also working on the set of suggestions we then called “New Italian Epic”. The notes I wrote down for this speech are exactly contemporary to “Spectres of Muntzer”. Defeat doesn’t necessarily entail defeatism, and our activity is faithful to the necessity of foundational events, new beginnings and so on.
You’ve got an important point there about the movement being “Sorelian”, we even explicitly theorised it in those months. We chose to ignore that every use of George Sorel’s predications ended up in a disaster. Sorel was the main theorist of “technified myth”, of sharpening myths as though they were spears, usable by armies in phalanx formations. However, myths are much more complex than that, they aren’t simply tools. They’re rather more like worlds, and you cannot “sharpen” a whole world without killing all that’s living within it.
What you describe with reference to Stephen Duncombe’s proposals isn’t exactly what K. Kerenyi (and then F. Jesi) called “genuine myth”, because “genuine myth” cannot be, er, used for a specific purpose, because it cannot even be made. In Kerenyi’s view, the encounter with genuine myth is an “epiphany”, it’s more similar to “illumination”, Satori, the kind of things you can find in Eastern philosophies. In our case, we could say that the epiphany of “genuine myth” is that state of mind, that kind of awareness we conquer or renew when we bump into mind-opening stories and come to see our struggle in a wider context, both historical and geographical. “Technification” is any attempt at “channelling” those stories and that state of mind into one consistent narrative that can be used as a weapon for a specific purpose (like Sorel’s myth of the general strike).
Duncombe’s “Ethical spectacle” may sound a little more close to what Furio Jesi, in his essay on the 1919 Spartacist uprising (“Spartakus: Symbology of Revolt”, written in 1969 and published for the first time in 1998) tried to describe with the oxymoron “Genuine propaganda”, ie truthful political communication that generates from the encounter with genuine myth. However, there are extremely important, even dramatic, differences: Jesi wrote that such a propaganda is very rare. According to him, an example of genuine propaganda was the fact that Rosa Luxenburg and Karl Liebknecht didn’t sneak off of Berlin during the uprising, even if they disagreed with that line of action, and even if the conservation of their lives was necessary for the survival of the cause after the unavoidable defeat. They decided to stay in Berlin because they wanted to demonstrate that their words had been true, they wanted to embody those words (communism, unity of the class, facing the “monsters” of warmongering capitalism) in a moment of “epiphany”.
Jesi wrote:
Genuine propaganda is the communication (aimed at proselytizing) of political ideas in which one believes so much as to involve in this experience even the so-called ‘irrational’ part of the psyche. This becomes morally possible only if one is really willing to throw himself in the struggle in a total (both “rational” and “irrational”) way. Such willingness is obviosly rare nowadays. Very few people are willing to “risk their souls”, and not only their official faces, for political engagement… [Luxemburg and Liebknecht], at that very moment, demonstrated that their propaganda was genuine, ie instead of using degenerate myths, it aimed at becoming an authentic language of truth.
Of course this is not the only possible way of “incarnating” genuine propaganda. If we said so, we’d fall in a self-sacrificial trap. It is an important reflection though: the global movement’s “political theatre” failed precisely in this, that it didn’t accomplish genuine propaganda, ie all of a sudden it sounded terribly… phony, inadequate. And that’s also one of the reasons why it can be described as “technified myth”, ie myth purposefully crafted and used as tool. I’m not sure that an “ethical spectacle” can escape this ambush. I hope the stress lays more on the adjective than the noun, because in my “Sorelian” days I’ve seen (and fostered) too much spectacle and too few ethically significant acts.
hmm, this is an interesting distinction and i really like where this discussion is going. I will be back!
This is an interesting exchange. I had a similar thought as Merijn with regard to the responsibility of storytellers. I don’t quite see how the problem was technified myth so much as that there were other things the movement had misunderstood and failed to do. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood but I take the point about mythification to be the bending of myth overly much toward instrumental ends, in this case toward mobilization to the Genoa protests. But if the movement had had a better understanding and a better strategy and some people had still treat myth the same way — or, instead of hypotheticals about the past, I’ll use a hypothetical about the future… let’s the movement achieves a better strategy and vision (I don’t have much more detail on that, unfortunately). In that case, I’m not sure that the instrumentalization/technification of myth is a problem. At the very least, there’s a difference between the types of problems: lack of strategy and falling into a trap seems to me a different problem from technification of myth. The two both happened in Genoa, with awful consequences, but they seem to me to be different problems, unless I’ve misunderstood something. In that sense, I’m not sure if I have much of a problem with the sharpening of myths into spears to be used by armies, I think perhaps the pressing issue might be the form of the army and its goals — and perhaps its metaphors; I think the criticisms of the movement “storm the castle” metaphor is very apt.
One other thought, only partially related. I know there is a long history of radicals using one historical moment to think about another moment — we can read Marx writing about the Paris Commune to think about the present, or use Gramsci writing about Lenin’s remarks on the Bolsheviks. Or we can reflect on our experiences in a cycle of struggles ten years ago and use that to draw parallels to the present and differences about the present, to guide decisions today. People might argue about what moments to prioritize and how to interpret them (and clearly there are very bad ways to think this way, mechanical versions of marxism and so forth). Still, I think it’s clear that transposing historical moments like this is a useful way to think about and to plan actions in the present. At the risk of being overly philosophical, it strikes me that that type of historical thought is at the very same time a type of metaphorical thought. Whether or not it’s myth, I’m not sure about, I have trouble telling myth from metaphor. I wonder then if perhaps part of the difference between technified and nontechnified myth, at least in some cases, might be a sense of history. A technified understanding of the bolshevik revolution (or of times when peasants have stormed castles) applied in the present would mechanically move between the two and would fail to understand that the comparison was metaphorical and not a matter of actual identity between historical moments, while a non-technified version would understand the differences in historical context and understand that the comparisons were drawn analytically rather than being an identity between the moment. Sorry if I’m stretching the terms too far here…!
take care,
Nate
But, Nate, can we really draw a clear distinction between our strategies and our narratives? Aren’t our strategies dependent upon the story we believe we’re part of? I think that if we tell ourselves the “wrong” story, then we’ll have a distorted idea of who we are, and we’ll automatically choose a wrong strategy. That’s why “technified myth” is not viable. Technified myth channels all the imaginative energies into a strict conceptual tunnel. It reduces the wealth of possible stories and metaphors to the misery of *one strict allegorical narrative*, and then it creates a hypnotic effect, making the people believe that the allegory isn’t in fact an allegory, it’s quite literally what we’re experiencing right now. We are really storming the castle. Northern Italy is really a Celtic land. Mussolini was really resuscitating the Roman empire. With George W’s “War on Terror” we really were at the Thermopylae facing hordes of eastern barbarians, as the movie 300 explicitly stated. And so on. In the second part of your comment you get very close to describing the way this problem presents itself. It certainly has something to do with lack of good historical perspective, which is replaced by another perspective, a cleverly distorted one. However, we should remember that the knowledge of history doesn’t “immunize” us automatically, it can always be perverted.
Of course, regarding Genoa 2001, one can see strategy and myth-making as two separate problems, but they were just two aspects of the same problem. Strategy depends on narratives.
hi WM1,
Thanks for this. Very thought provoking. I think your point about strategy as narrative dependent is really interesting. I’ve rewritten this sentence a few times and can’t formulate it clearly so I’ll just give up and go with what I’ve got – in a way it seems like there’s a sort of meta-narrative or second order narrative. I mean, there are different levels of strategy (for an event, for an organization, for a movement), which sometimes overlap or even contain each other. Likewise with narratives, I’d guess, right? (In fiction and in movements.)
Getting back to the technified myth point, I find what you’ve said here pretty convincing. At the same time, I’m not *fully* convinced yet.
If I understand you right, you’re saying a few different things about technified myths and about the particular technified myths involved in this situation. So, you said that the movement got caught up in a metaphor or myth and so missed a lot – the ‘storming the castle’ metaphor. That’s totally convincing. You’ve basically said that the problem with this was two-fold. It was a bad myth in its content, inaccurate in a way. Here too I’m totally convinced.
And you’re also saying it was a bad myth in its form – it was technified. Here I’m still a bit unsure. I suggested above that maybe a different myth would have been okay if technified but with a different content. You’ve said that that’s not enough, the content of the castle metaphor wasn’t the only problem, it was also the use or form of the myth (and partly the idea that myths are tools to be used).
I think maybe I’m starting to understand your point as I type this out. The problem specific to technification is related to the being caught up in the myth and related to the use of myth as a sharpened spear, as you put it. My initial reaction was “what’s wrong with sharpening spears, this was just the wrong spear” but maybe I’m starting to get the point here. Using myth as a sharpened spear means trying to get other people to be caught up in a myth, right? That is, a sharpened myth means getting other people to think “we really are storming the castle!” I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but am I getting close?
My initial reaction about wanting to defend myths as sharpened spears was related to wanting to defend propaganda used to mobilize people. I see now that you’re addressing, among other things, the *ways* to mobilize people, and the ways not to.
With this in mind, I think maybe there are two problems with technification in this particular situation. On the one hand, most everyone got caught up in the myth, yourselves included, and you helped maintain/propagate this for others. Right? So it seems like you’re saying both “we (the movement and individual comrades) should be careful not to get caught up in myths this way” and you’re saying “we (people who excel at mythmaking) should not attempt to produce myths that people get caught up in in this way.”
Am I making sense here? Am I understanding you now?
take care,
Nate
[...] Just posing the titular question makes it clear… there are really multiple roles. Anyway, I want to note a discussion over at the Wu Ming blog, here: http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/wumingblog/?p=1049 [...]
That’s a perfect summing-up, Nate.